EDC 102H F15 - School Investigations

School Investigations:
Effects of Charter Schools in RI Districts

Overview

One of the major objectives of this class is for you deepen your understanding of American public education and improve your ability to critically explore and discuss information relevant to school performance and potential reform approaches. This type of knowledge might be useful for you in several ways, including understanding potential schools where you might consider teaching, understanding what types of data are available for schools, and choosing where you might want to live and raise a family.

For the next few weeks, we will be reading Jay Matthew's book about the beginning of the KIPP Program. This book tells the story of how two young men are trying to provide innovative learning opportunities to students in need. One of the linchpins of current reform efforts is increasing student access to charter schools. Critics, especially the scholar Diane Ravitch, argue that charter schools can be either very good, about the same as the traditional school, are very bad. During this assignment, we will investigate local charter schools and their traditional counterparts to determine their impact on education in Rhode Island's neediest districts. In our "investigations," we will base our conclusions on facts that we can gather from various sources. To understand what might be happening "behind the scenes" within a school or district, you have to be able to formulate questions and seek out evidence that helps answer those questions. You must be able to examine relevant social, political, and institutional factors, and understand how these factors relate and how they interact to influence the nature of education in our schools. Our guiding questions for our investigative work will be:

How have charter schools and neighborhood schools performed with comparable populations over the past five years?Is there evidence that local charter schools weaken traditional schools in their neighborhoods?

Our Process

In past years, we have started our school invesigations by learning to use research tools to answer questions about our schools. This involved some explorations that are guided by librarians in the URI Curriculum Materials Library as well as some investigations on our own to find data sources that could help us answers specific questions about our schools. This year, we will build on this pattern to focus on charter-public school pairs to investigate our specific questions.

In the past, each student has created their own report. In the past, we have written some of our context report sections in teams. This has worked pretty well, so we will repeat this again. This year, we will work in teams to investigate and report on the communities and the districts, and then work individually to write our school descriptions.




Our Products

For your final project, you will work pair up to develop a detailed account of one community that hosts a public and a charter school. These descriptions should be exhaustive and based on evidence. In addition to these descriptions that you develop together, you will also describe a school within your district individually. Your final report should be of a high enough quality to be published online. Given this goal, it is critical that each claim you make must be supported with evidence, that you cite your sources carefully, and that you avoid including personal opinion or a biased point of view.

In the past, we have used both a private and a public web space for our reports. Students and teams have initially posted their reports to our website URIteacherknowledge so that we could work together to refine our reports. A copy of the final pages have remained in URITK as a reference for the School of Education student teachers. In the cases where there was already a context report on URITK, students were encouraged to begin their research by reviewing this report, and substantially extend and improve what was already present.

In the course of writing your description of your school and district, you should use APA format to cite your sources. We will install and learn to use a citation manager called Zotero to help you gather and manage citations for each piece of evidence you include in your report.

Key Deadlines

Reference the class schedule for the following due date for this project:

• Milestone: Class Questions
• Deadline: School District Selection
• Deadline: Draft Context Statement posted on URIteacherknowledge
• Deadline: Final Context Statement posted on URIteacherknowledge
• Deadline: Final Context Statement published publicly